Who has two thumbs and is moving on to level 3?! This girl!!!!!!

You read that right…I’m moving on to level 3!!! Somehow by the grace of God I made it through another semester of nursing school. It was a stressful semester indeed. It was filled with mix-ups, schedule changes, delays, and anything and everything that could possibly make nursing school even more stressful than one would prefer.

I had a pretty descent clinical experience this semester. Thankfully I was able to spend more than 5 days with real patients! We still had to go on campus for 3 weeks, but somehow everyone made it through those rough days that we had to act out scenarios of patient, nurse, graduate nurse, and observer! If you ask anyone how those weeks went they’ll tell you they didn’t sign up for acting classes and it was the worst 6 days of their life…but somehow we made it through anyways!

My clinical instructor was probably one of the hardest of all of the instructors for level 2. She was notorious for sending students home if they didn’t have their med sheets completed, lab results filled in, or if they weren’t squared away on their immunizations etc. Yes, she was very hard and didn’t go easy on any of the students, but I’m thankful for that. I already feel that we’re behind because we missed out on so much clinical time last semester and it was nice to be pushed to do as much as possible in the time we were given. Something else that I can say is that I’m walking away with a better understanding of medications and lab values. I have a better understanding on how lab values are affected by meds, diagnosis and other situations! Another nice thing that happened in my instructor told me to hang onto her phone number so that I could use her as a reference whenever I go out to find a job after graduation!  Woot!

I think it’s fair to say that everyone in nursing school is in a fragile, physical, mental, and emotional state! We’re being pushed to our limits, we’re cramming our brains with every last bit of information we can learn, we’re exhausted from the hours we put into our studying, our families suffer because we may be home…but we’re not “home.” We don’t have enough time to clean or organize so everything becomes one huge mess each semester. I’ve been able to see some of my fellow classmates and how they react when they hit “emotion overboard.” Some write nasty comments on our classes’ homepage, some make snide  remarks to the instructors, some hold it in until they explode at a friend because they accidently said the normal range for sodium us 3.5-5.0 (the range for potassium) when it really should be 135-145! I’ve seen all of the reactions above. The one thing that has really stuck with me this semester is that I need to learn to just roll with the punches. There’s a lot of things that I can’t change and there’s even more things that I don’t know or haven’t learned yet. However, the one thing that I can take control of is my attitude and the way I react in certain situations. In nursing school it’s nice to be able to have control of something…even if it’s as small as smiling at your instructor when everyone else is mad-dogging them. Some may call it brown-nosing; but I call it respect.

So that’s that. I’ve completed level 2! I’ve still got two thumbs and some brain cells in my head and I’m moving on to level 3! So I have 4 weeks to relax, recoup,  and do something fun and maybe even have a bit of a social life *GASP!!!* I would however, like to leave you with a quote that has helped me make it this far through nursing school. It’s a famous quote/prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr:

God grant me the serenity 
to accept the things I cannot change; 
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time; 
Enjoying one moment at a time; 
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; 
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it; 
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life 
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.